Yotify Launches Its "Google Alerts On Steroids"

0

Today sees the launch of Yotify, an online alert system that aims to make the web “work for you”. At a high level, Yotify can best be described as a very sophisticated version of Google Alerts, which allows users to get notifications whenever a pre-determined keyword pops up in a news article or blog post. But instead of simply monitoring keywords, Yotify allows users to track variables across a number of different services, including price changes, event ticket availability, and user profile modifications.

Users can access a listing of their current alerts (called Scouts) from their Yotify homepage, which intuitively displays all results inline. The site also offers an opt-in Email digest, which will periodically forward a listing of all relevant matches across each service to a specified address. Yotify employs a filtering system to weed out duplicate entires, and also makes it easy to prioritize results from each Scout.

At launch the site supports over a dozen services, including offerings from travel sites, eBay, and Shopping.com. CEO Ron Bouganim is quick to point out that the Scouts for each of these services are tightly integrated with their APIs – Yotify isn’t just performing complex text based searches.

One potential use case for Yotify involves LinkedIn, which is included among the site’s supported services. An executive (or headhunter) keen on recruiting a particular engineer could use Yotify to monitor the user’s LinkedIn profile, so they’d know when that person’s employment status changed. Other applications include price watching (through the Shopping.com Scout) or an event notification run through eBay’s Tickets for whenever a concert is announced in your area.

Beyond automated alerts, Yotify also includes a number of social features. Users can share Scouts with each other, which can be useful when multiple people are looking for the same thing (for example, a group of friends looking for housing could share a Craigslist Scout for apartment rentals). The site also allows users to broadcast questions to FriendFeed and Facebook, treating responses from friends as another Scout on the main Yotify page.

Yotify doesn’t seem to have done anything extraordinary – many of the alerts available can already be achieved with more specialized services. But the site has created an intuitive web dashboard and email alert system that aggregates these notifications in a single place, which could make it appealing to a much broader audience than its alternatives.